Yesterday evening, Stephen
S. Pawlowski of Intel gave a keynote speech at ISC'13 entitled 'Moore's Law
2020'. "People are always saying that Moore's Law is coming to an end, but
transistor dimensions will continue to scale two times every two years and improve
performance, reduce power and reduce cost per transistor," he says. "Moore's
Law is alive and well."

"But getting to
Exascale by 2020 requires a performance improvement of two times every year,"
Pawlowski explains. "Key innovations were needed to keep us on track in
the past: many core, wide vectors, low power cores, etc."

"Going forward, scaling will be as much about material and
structure innovation as dimension scaling". He cites potential future technologies,
such as graphene, 3D chip stacking, nanowires, and photonics, as ways of achieving
this.

Pawlowski argues for less focus on achieving a good score on
the Top 500 list by optimising performance for the Linpack benchmark. Instead,
he says, there needs to be more focus on creating machines suited to running scientific
applications. "Moore's Law continues, but the formula for success is changing,"
concludes Pawlowski.